In the little town where I was raised, fuel for cooking was always at a premium, as it was everywhere in France. Only the big hotels roasted lamb, beef, and poultry every day. Only the big brick oven of the boulanger baked loaves of crusty bread, which we youngsters were sent to buy each day, and the pâtisserie was the source of those irresistible sweet cakes, the gâteaux, petits fours, and friandises, But my mother and my grandmother knew ways of cooking that did not require great quantities of the carefully hoarded fagots. When we filled our big clay marmite with water, addeda plump old hen or beef and vegetables to make a nourishing soup and put it on the range to simmer, we could encourage the slowly rising bubbles with the merest handful of twigs.
Mais oui, savory soups, full-bodied stews, and perfectly blended sauces are all children of necessity. They have all been brought to perfection because the French needed to conserve fuel. But not all foods—and no one knows it better than a French cook—lend themselves to gentle simmering. Many foods are so tender that they would fall to pieces in the marmite. Besides, they need outside crispness, a golden-brown crustiness, to contrast with their tenderness and seal in their special succulence. For foods like these, Maman brought out the big black skillet. In it she heated clarified butter or fresh sweet fat drippings, and sautéed delicate foods in ten, fifteen, or at the most, twenty minutes. And just a few of the precious faggots, not nearly so many as roasting and broiling required, could supply the heat.
To say that sautéing, the subject of this month's article, is a method of cooking “fit for a king” is to use perhaps the worst kind of cliché, since there are so few kings to cook for these days. But it is a fact that Napoleon himself, once king and emperor of France, gave it his blessing. Anyone in Royal can tell you the story about the time Napoleon stopped in that little town just at lunchtime and went for his midday meal to the local inn, which, because it was run by the miller's pretty wife, was called La Belle Meunière. Napoleon, like other travelers in France, knew that if he ordered a spécialité de la maison he could be sure of something extra good. So he asked what the specialty of the house was, and the answer with 300 out an instant's hesitation was, “la truite sautée.” La belle meunière herself cooked and served the fish for the great man in the local way, sautéed and dressed simply with a few drops of lemon juice, a little finely chopped parsley, and a generous spoonful of butter cooked to a hazelnut brown. Napoleon was delighted, declared that he had never eaten better fish, and named the dish truite sautée belle meunière, as a tribute to the miller's wife. In France, trout cooked in this manner is still called by that name. And all over the world, wherever there are French cooks, any dish dressed with browned butter is called belle meunière or beurre meunière.
Sautéing is confusing to some American cooks, just as the word “frying,” as used by Americans, is anything but clear to the French. In the French cuisine there are two ways of cooking in fat on the top of the stove. One is to sauté, to cook in a shallow pan in a small amount of fat, not more than a quarter of on inch deep. As a matter of fact, sometimes the bottom of the pan is merely coated with fat. The other way is to fry, sometimes called “deep fry,” in enough far to submerge the food or permit it to floar on the surface. But no French cook ever “fries” anything in half an inch or so of far in a shallow pan, which I understand is a common method in this country and is the reason why the term “frying pan” is in bad repute.
I am not going to urge you to throw away your frying pans, because I know what a valuable utensil a frying pan, or skillet, is. Instead I am going to tell you how to use it properly, in the French way.
First the pan itself. In France it is called either sautéuse or sautoir; in America, frying pan or skillet. These pans are made in two ways. The sides may slant out and away from the bottom of the pan or the sides may rim the pan at right angles to the bottom. If the sides flare, the steam escapes more quickly and encourages the maintaining of a crisp surface. But in either case the sides are never deeper than one and a half or two inches. Many different metals are used to make these pans: there are the old-fashioned ones of castiron or tin-lined copper, the more modern aluminum, the copper-and-stain less steel combinations, and the iron pans coated with colored enamels. All of them are excellent if—and this is very important—the metal is thick enough. Because sautéing is done over good brisk heat, a very heavy metal pan that will diffuse the hear evenly is a necessary. Otherwise the food will not brown evenly and often will not be cooked through. Thin pans too often overcook or even scorch the surface of the fond before the inside is done. Also, when food is sautéed, the entire surface should he in contact with the bottom of the pan at once and, unfortunately, thin metal tends to warp with use and lose its perfectly flat surface, so that the food browns unevenly.
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